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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458947">more pieces of me being brought to life</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad'>Gammarad</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Hollow (Cartoon)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Post-Season 2, Season 2 meets Season 1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 17:22:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,520</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458947</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa gets some weird texts that say she needs to talk to herself. What could that possibly mean?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Fic In A Box</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>more pieces of me being brought to life</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/gifts">the_rck</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title comes from Symbiosis by Tyler Knott Gregson</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Vanessa was stocking the shelves in the chips and snacks aisle when she heard her phone play the text message sound. Not the best time to check when she had an awkward armful of Pepritos and Cheddo corn crisps. As she slid the single-serving chip bags into their rows, Vanessa heard two more text messages arrive.</p><p>"Just a minute," she muttered irritably. Fifteen minutes later, she'd finished the aisle. "I'm going on break, Mom."</p><p>Her mother said something grouchy, but Vanessa wasn't listening. She leaned against the wall in the back room as she slid her finger along the phone. What an old, outdated model. All her friends had the latest Dasher Megas, or a Mango Century, a good phone, and she was stuck with this old Taka 12. That was what she got for spending everything she could scrape together on a fancy memory-glitching contact and then losing anyway. </p><p>The text messages didn't make any sense. Stupid phone. They were from Weirdo, which should be cool - the TV host texting her, a losing contestant, a year later? If it had made sense, it could've been. But it wasn't "Oh Vanessa we want you to come back for a second chance holiday special tournament" or "Your fan base is surprisingly large so come make a guest appearance in our upcoming season," no, it was something incomprehensible. </p><p>"You sent yourself a message. You need your help. Drop by the Hollow studio tonight and I can let you talk to yourself," Gustaf had texted, from a modern phone obviously, because the format was all garbled. If she had a proper device that'd give the text a cool animated background; on her Taka 12 it just interspersed gobbledygook between the lines. </p><p>Vanessa growled to herself. Sure, the Hollows host was a weirdo, but this was too weird even for him. She decided to call in help, and forwarded the texts to Reeve. "What do you think this means?" she added after the forwarded messages.</p><p>"Sounds suspicious to me. Don't go." Vanessa should've known Reeve would say that. And she probably shouldn't go. But, she didn't have anything important to do tonight, and it would bother her for weeks if she didn't find out what the weirdo had meant, so she thought she probably would.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div><blockquote>
  <p>Vanessa had it easy here in fake reality, and that was mostly because she'd made up with the other team, because they were all friends now, and especially because she was now friends with Kai.</p>
  <p>Her parents let her stay out past her former curfew, let her go hang out when they would have made her work a shift in the store, because they liked Kai -- they liked that his family had money. Vanessa had overheard them talking about it.</p>
  <p>"But he's younger than she is," her mother had said, sounding worried.</p>
  <p>"That's all right. It's good, even. Because if he was older, she might feel too much pressure. This way, it even things out between them." That had been an awful thing to hear her father say.</p>
  <p>In fact, if they had been her real parents she'd overheard having that conversation, Vanessa would've been so creeped out she might never want to hang out at Kai's again. But since it was just simulated Mom and Dad, it was somehow all right. Just a hack to let her enjoy her life more with less parental interference.</p>
  <p>Things had been going great, in terms of living their lives, she'd thought, they'd got too relaxed about the whole situation once there hadn't been anymore "players" for Hollow Life. And then the game -- the world -- had started glitching. </p>
  <p>Reeve had seen it first. Vanessa hadn't believed it was happening until she'd seen it for herself. And a week or two after she saw the first glitch, the Big Glitch had happened.</p>
  <p>Everything reset. Everyone forgot the entire time since they'd first woke up here in Hollow Life -- everyone except Vanessa and her friends. </p>
  <p>One good thing about the Big Glitch, it'd brought Skeet back. He was not as chill as before, since he remembered the giant snail killing him, but he wasn't dead anymore. They were all so glad to have him back. </p>
  <p>But it was looking like it'd happen again, and none of them wanted that. Hollow Life didn't have infinite memory, it wasn't designed to go forward forever, it was designed to reset after a season. Vanessa, Reeve, Kai, Skeet, Mira and Adam didn't want to relive the same six months of their teenage lives over and over and over forever. It was boring enough doing it a second time. Imagine the fourth, the tenth, the thousandth...</p>
</blockquote><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div><p>Living in the same city as the Hollow studio and game development headquarters was the only reason Vanessa had been able to compete and get her chance at escaping the life she was stuck in, where she would work in her parents' store until she married someone they approved of. Neither of which was anything she wanted to do.</p><p>When the Hollow was in beta testing, they'd recruited at the local schools. You could get parental permission and sign up to try the game out. That was before the memory suppression technology had been allowed on kids -- it'd been for adult trauma victims who hadn't responded to conventional treatment back then, just out of the experimental phase. Not something a game could make use of yet. So they'd had to find new players for every test. </p><p>Vanessa had forged her mother's signature and managed to do great on the beta she'd joined, so much that the Hollow developers had asked her to join their permanent beta to playtest some of the later modules. That was when she'd met Skeet and Reeve, in the playtests. Skeet had been on Vanessa's first team, and Reeve had been on the opposing team with Mira and Adam. </p><p>Reeve had got separated from his team and then he'd stolen the endgame weapon right out from Vanessa's team's scenario. She'd been so impressed with him that she'd decided then and there that she would try to find a way to get him on side.</p><p>Which had taken a while. She'd played him on a long string, calling once in a while to see how he was doing, talk about the game, become his friend. He was cool. Always cagey, cynical, knew how things stood, not a sucker like most people, not an asshole like most of the ones who weren't suckers. Vanessa hadn't had to pretend to like Reeve for long; pretty quickly it had become sincere enough that all she'd had to do was modulate what came naturally. </p><p>So when he had that fight with Adam that seemed like it was worse than all the times before, she pounced on the opportunity, and he was hers. And she had thought it was a good sign that the team they were up against was Reeve's old team -- that it'd give them an advantage. </p><p>Vanessa parked her bike and chained it to the bike rack just outside the front entrance of the Hollow studios. Dusk was gathering, a cloudy evening with the wind picking up. A gust blew some fallen leaves past as she stepped into the pool of bright artificial light under the entrance rain canopy.</p><p>"Gustaf?" Vanessa tried the door, but it was locked. She pulled out her dud of a phone and texted him a simple "I'm here."</p><p>"Hey, Vanessa," he said, opening the door.</p><p>She gave him her best customer-service smile. "How's the new season of your show coming along?" she asked. </p><p>"Terrible. After last season, when one team lost so early and the others, well, the ratings tanked, didn't they? So everyone's pushing their own little plans to fix things this season, and it's chaos. Not in the good way." Gustaf didn't have his hair done in full Weird Guy style, but he still had that manic look. </p><p>Vanessa'd never seen him without it. Time to cut the small talk. "You sent me some really weird texts. What was all that about?"</p><p>"Patience, I'm about to show you." He led the way through the studio hallways to what looked like a server room. Maybe this was where the Hollow game was running? Stacks of leaf computers were sitting in air columns keeping them cool. It looked like any server room, not interesting at all, the usual glittering readout lights and occasional sparks as a leaf burned out here or there. With thousands of leaves in each stack, it wasn't a problem; the technicians would replace them in the morning. </p><p>Along one side, there were a row of terminals. Gustaf walked around the row and behind it, seeming to vanish. </p><p>Vanessa followed. Back here there was a smaller stack of larger, older leaves, submerged in a liquid coolant, making them more resistant to burnout. Next to it were a pair of terminals, also of an older style. They had the pull-down screens that had been popular when Vanessa was little. </p><p>Gustaf pulled one of the screens up and enlarged it, then sat down in front of it. On the screen was a room that looked a whole lot like a digitized version of Vanessa's own bedroom. Vanessa felt a little sick, her legs unsteady so she sat in the other chair. Why did it look like her room? What was this?</p><p>Words were appearing at the top corner of the screen as Gustaf typed them. "She's here," the words read, "I'll leave you two to talk." He stood. "You'll explain everything," he said, just as incomprehensible as his texts had been. </p><p>Vanessa couldn't pull her eyes off the screen. Her own avatar walked onto it. A word bubble appeared over her head. "Is that me? Real Vanessa? It's you, Virtual Vanessa. Or should that be the other way around. This is so confusing, you know? Of course I know." </p><p>She started typing. She had to figure this out. Now the texts made sense, but really, none of this made sense. No sense at all.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div><blockquote>
  <p> They had a way to send messages to Weirdo, but the others didn't understand. "Your real self hasn't been through her redemption arc," Kai said with complete seriousness. "We can't trust her. We definitely can't trust the person who sold her that cheater gadget!"</p>
  <p>"Kai, if there was anyone here who could have fixed this, it would have been you," Vanessa had argued. "You have that thing! The fixing stuff thing. And you can't figure it out. None of you even thought cheating was possible. Markus figured it out and made a contact lens that actually did it, we have to ask him, and I'm the only one who can do it. I mean, he wouldn't trust the rest of you, he'd think you wanted him punished for cheating --"</p>
  <p>"We do want him punished for cheating," Adam interrupted.</p>
  <p>"See?"</p>
  <p>"Real me can offer him money," Kai said. "I think we should ask him."</p>
  <p>"Real you won't be able to find him or get him to listen to you, and he didn't do it for money," Vanessa said. That was not quite true. She'd paid him plenty. But she'd seen that Markus had other motives, just not what they were. Though she had her suspicions. She didn't for a second trust any version of Kai to keep up with a guy like Markus when it came to the subtle aspects of getting someone to do what you wanted. </p>
  <p>"It's too dangerous," Reeve said. "If we contact this hacker, he'll know about our Hollow Life server, and if he knows about it, he'll want to hack it, and we live here, remember? If he crashes it, we die. Not worth risking that."</p>
  <p>And he'd got Mira and Adam to agree, and Skeet had refused to have an opinion about it at all, and even Kai wouldn't go along with Vanessa completely. She hated having to go behind their backs, but what choice had there been? So she'd contacted Gustaf and told him she had to talk to herself, it was an emergency, and he'd done it.</p>
  <p>And here she was. The words from the other Vanessa appeared on the wall screen she'd scrounged from Kai's cache of extra older gaming equipment. He kept the older stuff, he said, in case there was an old game that he wanted to play and didn't have an updated version. And this one had been extra. It might have been a lie to get her parents to let her keep it, but that hardly mattered in the virtual world. Whatever made life easier, right? </p>
  <p>"Prove you're me. Say something only I would know," she saw appear on the wall, one letter at a time. Huh. That was what Vanessa had been planning to say. It must really be her. </p>
  <p>"The time I won that ring at the fairgrounds and put it in the cake Mom was making, and forgot, and nearly broke a tooth," Vanessa said. "Now your turn. What'd I do?"</p>
  <p>"Kept it in my cheek like a hamster until everyone was done with dessert," the words said. "So how is there a second me? What's going on?"</p>
  <p>Vanessa explained. "So we need you to find Markus and get him to send us the code he put in that contact," she ended, "so we can hack this world we're in and get it to stop resetting."</p>
  <p>"I thought you said it resets because it runs out of memory," the Original Vanessa said.</p>
  <p>"We'll get it to dump something else. No one wants to be stuck in a time loop."</p>
  <p>"I'll talk to him," Original Vanessa said. "Sorry, Gustaf is back and says I have to go." </p>
  <p>Vanessa felt the first hope she'd felt since the Big Glitch. It was going to work out.</p>
</blockquote><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div> <p>"There's no way that would work," Markus said. He waved his hands around as if they were trying to convince Vanessa by sheer momentum.</p><p>Vanessa folded her arms. "Sure it will. Your code can hack the Hollow, they're living in some kind of version of the Hollow, it's got to be possible. Maybe not easy, but, look, we have to try."</p><p>"You aren't listening. It's not difficult, it's literally unworkable. The simulation software is made out of their memories. If they didn't remember it when they were scanned for the game, it's not in this Hollow Life sim, and if it's not in there, it can't be hacked, right?" Markus bunched his hands in his hair. "Like, if you're bald, you can't dye your hair."</p><p>"You could get a wig," Vanessa argued.</p><p>"Hmm. Maybe. Like, give them more memories. Get yourself scanned and put your current ones in there, then that Vanessa would have an identical but a year older twin, and both of you would be in it... but you said they have it running on a fixed stack. So that'd just mean it'd run out of space faster and have to reset sooner. It would give them some new material, but a shorter run time, I think." Markus started to scribble notes on his tablet. </p><p>"Plus I don't want another me in there," Vanessa pointed out.</p><p>"Plus that, yeah."</p><p>"So, what can we do for her? I mean me? I mean, you know what I mean."</p><p>"Hmm. Maybe we can get her out of there?"</p><p>"What? Is that possible?"</p><p>"I think so. Let me see what I can do." Markus looked at Vanessa sideways. "How are you going to pay for this?" he asked, his voice half an octave lower. </p><p>"I maybe have a friend with money. How much is it going to cost?" She hoped that the Vanessa in the sim could get the Kai in the sim to talk to actual Kai and get him to pay. Probably. And if not, well, Vanessa had done her best for herself and the others, and she wouldn't have to feel guilty about them. </p><p>She had just about had enough of that feeling since she'd talked to her other self. Knowing her cheating had not only been a waste of all her money, but had trapped a copy of herself and all the other players in a nightmarish simulated world forever? It was pretty awful. So she had to either make this work or know she'd done absolutely everything she could to try. </p><p>Otherwise she might never get a decent night's sleep again.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div><blockquote>
  <p>"So this is your room. I did not think you'd ever let me see it."</p>
  <p>"It's tiny," Vanessa said. Her room was only tiny compared to Kai's.</p>
  <p>"Same size as Miles's room," Kai said. "Which you saw at Mira's cookouts." He shrugged. "I thought your parents wouldn't let you have someone in your room." He lowered his voice so that he was just mouthing the words. "A boy," he clarified unnecessarily.</p>
  <p>Vanessa rolled her eyes, but he was mostly right. </p>
  <p>"It'll start soon," she said. </p>
  <p>"I see you have my old Tibo wall." Kai looked up at the wall, where a spinning gyroscope icon indicated content was loading. "That's new."</p>
  <p>"No, it always does that, that's the loading icon. I guess you forgot." Vanessa sat on the floor, leaning her back against the side of her bed, waiting. It was comfortable enough to watch the whole wall screen from here.</p>
  <p>"Loading icon, right."</p>
  <p>"I guess your home internet is fast enough you didn't see it often." Vanessa smirked. Time was, she would've felt bitter about that, but the fact that a simulation played loading icons for her and not for Kai just meant that was what they remembered. The real unfairness was something they'd left back in the real world, and it didn't seem like it could bother her anymore.</p>
  <p>Words began to appear on the wall screen. "This is Kai. I see you, I mean me, there on the screen." </p>
  <p>Kai started waving at the screen. "Hi, me!"</p>
  <p>"Vanessa says I should ask you something only I would know. Tell you what. Think of an animal." The letters paused, no more appearing for ten or fifteen seconds. Then, "What animal are you thinking of? A pu"</p>
  <p>"A purple elephant!" Kai shouted, shooting loose fists in the air.</p>
  <p>Vanessa cracked up laughing. </p>
  <p>"Only I would know that," appeared on the wall. "So. Should I believe her, Other Me? Should I give her money for this hacker friend of hers?"</p>
</blockquote><div class="center">
  <h1>🖥</h1>
</div><p>Vanessa and Kai sat in the server room at Hollow Studios and watched their virtual selves talking on the screen. She had to trust herself to persuade virtual Kai, she had to, there was nothing she could do to help and doing anything would probably be worse than doing nothing at all. Virtual Kai trusted his Vanessa a lot more than the real Kai trusted her.</p><p>Barely resisting the urge to bite her fingernails, knuckles, the insides of her lips, or anything at all as she waited, Vanessa for the first time felt actual regret for how she'd played Kai in the Hollow. Flirting with him, gaining his trust -- it had been so easy then -- and then dropping him. She should have realized how useful he'd be longer term. She shouldn't have gloated. She should've played it regretful, like she had to do it because of the game rules but really didn't want to. </p><p>Too late now for that kind of regret. Virtual Kai and Vanessa had better come through for themselves, because if they didn't, they were the ones who would suffer. "It's Vanessa again. Here's the thing," she typed when she couldn't stand it anymore and they had paused in their discussion of what virtual Kai ought to tell his real self. "My contact can't fix your server. Its processor can't handle the memory space it'd take to simulate your world for ten years, much less forever. Gustaf can't either, maybe he could sneak a copy onto a server for you but getting the programming team to rewrite it for a much bigger, more expensive server and then sneaking one of those off would be beyond even him, you know?"</p><p>Vanessa felt Kai leaning over her, reading what she was typing. She continued. "But even though this hacker can't pull off a fix-everything hack, he can write you a portal. The code's already set up for those. It'll take you anywhere you want to go online, not just around the Hollow games. Anywhere. If I can get him the money  he wants. Which I would give him if I had it, but I don't. But Kai does, so please just tell him you need it. Please. I want to help."</p><p>Vanessa watched the expressions on the two sim figures on the screen. Then she looked at the real Kai's face. </p><p>They were going to go for it. She had the sense, as she hadn't about anything since her team lost, that she had got this one right. She was still under her parents' roof, working a dead end job --trapped in reality -- but a version of her would be free.</p><p>She was surprised how good that made her feel.</p>
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